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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 02 2018, @09:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the sauce-for-the-goose dept.

The DNC's Lawsuit Against WikiLeaks Is an Attack on the Freedom of the Press

It's a large world, filled with felonies big and misdemeanors small. And so I prefer to write long columns. But sometimes a short, sharp word is necessary. The Democratic Party is suing WikiLeaks and they shouldn't. As Glenn Greenwald wrote last week in The Intercept:

The Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit this afternoon in a Manhattan federal court against the Russian government, the Trump campaign, and various individuals it alleges participated in the plot to hack its email servers and disseminate the contents as part of the 2016 election. The DNC also sued WikiLeaks for its role in publishing the hacked materials, though it does not allege that WikiLeaks participated in the hacking or even knew in advance about it; its sole role, according to the DNC's lawsuit, was publishing the hacked emails.

As Greenwald points out, the Dems' claim that "WikiLeaks is liable for damages it caused when it 'willfully and intentionally disclosed' the DNC's communications ... would mean that any media outlet that publishes misappropriated documents or emails (exactly what media outlets quite often do) could be sued by the entity or person about which they are reporting."

After the Manning releases in 2010, the Obama Justice Department wanted to sue WikiLeaks. However, they couldn't prove that anyone from WikiLeaks had actually stolen documents. They knew that suing WikiLeaks would have infringed on press freedom. Sue WikiLeaks, and you have to sue the Washington Post as well.

The DNC has no such qualms now.

Also at Al Jazeera.

See also: Why the DNC Is Fighting WikiLeaks and Not Wall Street


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 03 2018, @02:08PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday May 03 2018, @02:08PM (#675056)

    You're not understanding something with your "sovereign immunity" stuff: this is not a criminal trial, it's a civil lawsuit. "US jurisdiction" and laws are irrelevant. You can absolutely sue foreign actors or governments, and win judgments.

    Of course, good luck enforcing those judgments outside the country, but that's also the case with judgments against people or companies *inside* your country: you don't automatically get to collect any money awarded in a court judgment. It's actually a real pain to collect in many cases: you can file for garnishment of wages, or you can get the sheriff to accompany you while you seize assets, for instance, but these things generally take more time and money that you have to front, so it's really not worth winning a judgment against someone unless they have assets you can seize that'll make it worth it. (So winning against a large corporation is generally safe, because they'd rather just pay you rather than let you drive up and start taking all their stuff to sell on Ebay at pennies on the dollar, but sometimes they don't; I read about someone winning against Bank of America around 10 years ago and taking a bunch of their office furniture and stuff from a local bank branch with the sheriff's help because BoA wouldn't pay up.)

    For foreign governments, the standard route is to use your judgment to seize any assets owned by that government in your country.

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